


louder than bells

by ohclare



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - YouTube, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-13 04:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1213279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohclare/pseuds/ohclare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>arya only starts making videos because she's bored</p>
            </blockquote>





	louder than bells

**Author's Note:**

> this started with this prompt http://rhaenysdayne.tumblr.com/post/77000930525/arya-gendry-modern-youtubers-au which started spinning into bunnies in my head (unfortunately it's now started spinning even more bunnies in this verse too)

Arya only starts making videos because she's so bored. She knows that her parents have got a good reason for dragging the entire family down to Kings Landing for the summer when it's got the only hospital in Westeros that has a surgeon willing to do the experimental surgery on Bran's legs and that they should all be there to support him as he recovers – but that doesn't mean she has to find it fun. Of course it's nice to see Jon and Aunt Lyanna for longer than just a week but Jon's always dragging Robb off places and Dad is always talking to Aunt Lyanna and the novelty does wear off after a while. Sansa always invites her along with her friends but there's only so many afternoons of shopping and gossiping she can bear, and well Rickon's just a little too young. Normally it's her and Bran hanging out but he's so tired in the hospital and really there's nothing fun about sitting around there. So one afternoon she turns on her camera and tries one of those silly challenges she's seen on youtube before.

She doesn't intend to upload it at first but after wasting another afternoon editing it she decides that there really can't be much harm in it - she's already got an account on the site after all.

Once she starts she can't seem to stop. There's so many challenges out there that she knows she could continue forever if she really wanted to or at least until the end of the summer. She only tells Bran about it at first, as an attempt to cheer him up on a really bad day, and he insists on doing some with her. He can't do a lot of them but they make do with what can happen in a smallish hospital room and Arya realises it's a hell of a lot more fun making videos with someone else.

It's almost the end of the summer when she tells Jon and Robb, by the time people have actually started watching them and commenting on them, and that's only because she wants them to help her film Bran's first day outside in over a month. The four of them laugh so hard in the hospital garden that one of the nurses comes over worried that they were overexerting Bran and Arya struggles to reduce over two hours of filming down to a eight minute video.

Eventually she tells everyone and persuades all five of them to do a sibling tag video with her (because Jon has always been an honorary sibling even if he strictly isn't). Sansa isn't really sure about it at first and keeps on awkwardly looking at the camera but by the end she's almost managed to forget it. And when Arya shows her all the comments saying how pretty she is she struggles not to look pleased (even if both Robb and Jon have far more).

 

* * *

 

Arya always meant to stop when the summer ended but somehow when they got back to Winterfell she just kept on going. Perhaps she had school to occupy her time but Robb was in Kings Landing still for his final year of university and Sansa was in Oldtown for her first and she loved making videos.

And anyway more and people kept on finding her videos and she felt strangely like she shouldn't disappoint them.

It was weird in a way, having conversations with people who lived on the other side of Westeros or even from the other side of the world but she started to see the people she had conversations with in the comment section of her videos as friends just as much as the friends she saw every day.

 

* * *

 

It was when she started getting messages asking if she wanted to collab that she realised that she had to tell her parents, she couldn't outright lie to them about it. She knew that they knew that she liked to video herself but she wasn't entirely certain that they realised that she put them up on youtube and that complete strangers could watch them – and she wasn't certain how they would see it.

She told them over dinner about it in the end with Bran encouraging her from across the table. And all they asked was if she was being safe about it (and if they could watch her videos to make sure). Arya stared at them for a while before she quite took in that they didn't mind, although she was sure that they were just reserving judgement until they'd seen her videos. At least Bran looked as surprised as she felt.

 

* * *

 

Gendry was the first person she asked. They'd been messaging for ages and she knew that he was coming to Winterfell soon (he seemed to be a bit of a nomad really, travelling ever since he left school). He was far more popular than she was on youtube but he seemed really keen and anyway she liked him. Her mum insisted he came to theirs for it and reminded her not to leave him alone anywhere and her dad said he reminded him of someone but otherwise everything seemed fine.

He was a lot taller than she had been expecting somehow and he told her that she was a lot smaller and they'd have to be experimental with camera angles but otherwise it was exactly like messaging each other. She spends half the video laughing and the other half insulting him but it's probably the most fun she's ever had and she wishes he wasn't so nomadic so they could do it again sometime.

They upload their videos on the same day and Arya is pretty sure her number of subscribers doubles overnight. She's not quite sure what it means but half the comments seem to be something along the lines of 'I ship it' and since neither her or Bran have a clue what it means (and she really hopes urban dictionary is wrong) she ends up phoning Sansa because it's infinitely less embarrassing than asking anyone else. Sansa laughs for at least ten minutes before confirming that urban dictionary was right and she definitely has to watch those videos now.

 

* * *

 

She starts doing more collabs, mainly with those that live in the North like Wylla Manderly who is possibly the wittiest person she's ever met or the Karstarks who invite her bungee jumping off the wall or Lyanna Mormont who is quite possibly her platonic soulmate. It's hilarious and fun and if her grades suffer a little bit she decides not to care.

She visits Sansa in Oldtown and lets her friend Margaery do her makeup for her channel if she'll do the messiest challenge Arya can think of (distressingly she rises to it with aplomb), and Humfrey Hightower who takes her sailing, and she meets Gendry again. She's more vary this time but the moment he posts a picture of the two of them together on twitter to a flurry of responses she realises that it's inevitable.

 

* * *

 

She still applies to university (White Harbour, she has no intentions of going too far south), she knows that this can't last forever but she gets her parents to agree to letting her and Bran travel around half the country during the summer – even if they only agree on the condition that the two of them stay with family friends the entire time.

It's glorious though. She sees Gendry almost every other week and she meets so many people that were just names before she can hardly imagine it ending. And then towards the end she goes to VidCon in Kings Landing and it's even more ridiculous – she's sure that the handful of people who approach her only do it because she's with Gendry but it feels strangely surreal to have someone ask for her autograph. She films so many videos in that long weekend that she knows they'll last for months even if half of them are completely ridiculous and made on a couple of hours sleep.

 

* * *

 

University is strangely anticlimatic after all of that, strange to be away from Bran if nothing else. Lyanna is a first year too which makes it easier but it's harder work than she imagined and there's far less time to make videos even if she's living in a more exciting place than Winterfell. She loves White Harbour a lot but it's not quite what she imagined.

Gendry comes to visit a lot though, they don't often make videos now but just hang out together and he distracts from all the work she should be doing. Lyanna tells her every so often that the entire internet is sure they're dating but she's used to that now, she can ignore it because she knows it's not true. He's a bit like an old friend, someone you can insult and mess around with and not have to worry about it getting complicated (sure there's times when she gets a sudden urge to kiss him but that's just hormones getting in the way and she knows he just thinks of her like a little sister).

Jon visits a lot too, she hasn't quite figured out why yet but he seems to be in White Harbour a lot more that she ever knew and it's definitely not because of her (even if he is an unemployed layabout who just sings on youtube) since he barely visits Robb.

 

* * *

 

She ends up spending at a lot of that summer on Bear Island, messing around with Lyanna and her sisters, because Bran has ended up at Greywater Watch for some sort of camp and Sansa's gone to Highgarden and Robb has moved out with his girlfriend and as much as she loves her parents and Rickon she simply cannot spend an entire summer with them.

Gendry visits too. Of course he visits.

 

* * *

 

Arya's just got back to White Harbour when Gendry tells her that he's going to Essos for six months or longer. There's a stab of pain when she hears that and she barely hears him ask if she knows of any reason why he shouldn't go. Apparently saying that his mother will miss him is not the answer that he wanted to hear.

She misses him terribly, more than she thought she ever would and Lyanna's knowing looks don't help in the slightest.

One night her and Lyanna get outrageously drunk and she records a stupid rambling video full of her calling Gendry an idiot in a million different ways. Thankfully she remembers to set it as private before sending him the link. He comments on it with just a simple smiley face and she feels even more annoyed at him.

Perhaps it's a good thing that second year is so much harder she realises because this way she has less time to miss Gendry.

She messages him all the time, sending him daft little things and putting sly messages in her videos that she hopes that he'll pick up on. He sends her things too, it's almost every week she finds some small weird souvenir from a place that she's only ever heard about on TV, but he never says he misses her however many times she tells him the same.

 

* * *

 

It's almost a year in the end. He comes back just in time for Vidcon because he made a promise and Arya just manages to stop herself from running across the hall and throwing herself at him when she sees him. She hugs him tightly later on though and tells him that he better not go away for so long ever again, he makes no such promise but he hugs her back almost as tightly.

If it wasn't for the fact that Arya had her own places to be there would have been no way people could have separated her from Gendry. But strange as it seemed people seemed to have come there to see her and she couldn't let them down, she hated letting people down. That seemed to be the theme of the event in the end, no matter how hard she tried there was always something between her spending time with Gendry and she didn't hate people for it but she did find it annoying beyond words – sometimes it even felt as if Gendry himself was putting people between them.

It was only in the middle of a party Arianne Martell had decided to throw in her ridiculously large hotel suite at the end of the weekend that she managed to corner him and demand that he tell her all the stories from his travels. So as everyone else acted a little like maniacs Arya sat on the arm of his chair and just listened to him talk, and then he listened to her and the two of were in their own little world.

She didn't remember falling asleep but when she wakes in the middle of a disaster zone curled up on Gendry's lap and his arm around her she supposes she must have. Most people seem to have disappeared but the mess they caused certainly hasn't. She doesn't move though, where she is is far too comfortable for that and she doesn't want to wake up Gendry anyway.

She knows she probably fell asleep again before he wakes up because the next thing she remembers is him lightly kissing her head.

She's not sure who kisses first, she just knows that she lifts her head up slightly to look at him and the next thing she knows they're kissing. It's wonderful though, completely wonderful. He's nothing like the couple of boys she kissed at uni just to see what it was like, he's Gendry and he's perfect.

The moment is ruined though by the sudden applause from the doorway where half their friends are standing and grinning at them. Gendry looks a little embarrassed but Arya just grabs a pillow and throws it at them as hard as she can before going back to kissing.

 

* * *

 

they don't tell anyone for a long time. Well Arya tells her siblings and Gendry tells his mum and they both tell their mutual friends but anyone outside of that bubble doesn't get to know. She's sure people have guessed since he moved to White Harbour but really it's none of their business. They have to tell youtube eventually though, if only because they're moving in together the moment she finishes university and really she quite wants to be honest with those people she sees as friends – it's unbearable for a little bit but it dies down after a while and it's easier then.

So they find themselves a little flat in the middle of White Harbour and start living lives of domesticity and if they argue more than they get along well that's what makes them happy and who really cares.

 


End file.
